Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday March 08, 2007 @03:34PM
from the isn't-halloween-over dept.

coondoggie writes "IBM wants to help you find out if UFOs are real. Well, sort of. With UFO sightings seemingly on the rise, Big Blue is teaming with The Anomalies Network to offer UFO Crawler, a new search engine specifically tuned to search for information about the paranormal, unexplained or just plain bizarre. The search tool employs IBM's OmniFind Yahoo! Edition enterprise search software and the UFO Crawler should help users precisely target and gather information from relevant sources, including thousands of documents and files collected in the vast Anomalies Network archive, as well as multiple global resources across the Web on topics such as such as ghosts, conspiracy theories and extraterrestrials."

It only takes one incident to be extra-terrestrial to be some huge bombshell that shakes up our perception...There are probably a lot of sightings of stuff that are really just exotic aircraft and military projects. And then 80% of the reported UFOs are probably easily explainable as common stuff. I'm picking that number out of my ass but it's IIRC from some of the UFO documentaries I've seen.

I think it is highly plausible that if there was some sort of contact with not-of-this earth beings and technology

Wow man, it's a good thing you aren't one of those "crazies" that you talk about or you would have posted some bizarre rant about one world government and interdimensional beings instead of this well-thought-out rational discourse.

I think it is highly plausible that if there was some sort of contact with not-of-this earth beings and technology that the government would hide it, and try to take whatever they could for military advantage. Some of the reports I've read about secret budgets and groups seems highly plausible to me.

If the aliens are so smart and have such a military advantage... why the hell do they let the government push them around? I wouldn't even put up with airport security if I had advanced weaponry!

Conspiracy theories don't work like that. Conspiracy theories employ a sort of reverse Occam's Razor: do not accept the simplest logical explanation if a needlessly complicated conspiracy can be made to fit the same facts.

The problem with conspiracy theorists is they insist on sticking to their theory even when several aspects of it are empirically shown to be false. The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a great example of this.

For example: you say the hijackers were uneducated, but that's demonstrably false. Mohammed Atta, for example, had a Master's degree.

As for the Pentagon hit, there was tons of debris [abovetopsecret.com], and they DID hit plenty of other things on the way in, including several fences, cars, and a generator.

As for the crack about the "most secure nation on Earth," maybe you missed all the news stories for years after 9/11 about how most of our highest value targets (power plants, water treatment, etc, etc) are still completely open and vulnerable to attack.

So in this case, it's not a conspiracy that can be made to fit the facts, it's a conspiracy that will fit the "facts" that were made up to fit the theory.

As for the crack about the "most secure nation on Earth," maybe you missed all the news stories for years after 9/11 about how most of our highest value targets (power plants, water treatment, etc, etc) are still completely open and vulnerable to attack.

Oh really? So I could walk into a nuclear power plant today, or 3 years ago, with no problem? Is that a fact? That means I should have no problem carrying out my devious plan to put LSD in the water supply because, as you say, water treatment facilities a

Oh really? So I could walk into a nuclear power plant today, or 3 years ago, with no problem? Is that a fact? That means I should have no problem carrying out my devious plan to put LSD in the water supply because, as you say, water treatment facilities are "completely open." Somehow I suspect you'll stick with your theory even though part of it has been proven false.

You better have a LOT of LSD handy.. Its not like someone could go and plant bombs [foxnews.com] in california water supply.... note that they also found not one, not two, but TWENTY FIVE vehicles (that means cars and stuff). Of course if you want any significant amount of LSD to reach anyone, you better have one BIG ASS acid factory.

From the article:

"You can find just about anything in there," he said. "We've found safes from burglaries, soda pop machines, washing machines, all number of things."

Where to begin with the errors in this post. Let's start with:"12 uneducated Muslim extremists"

Uneducated? Is that what you called Mohamed Atta with his Architecture degree from Cairo Univeristy and his Masters degree obtained in Germany? Or Abdulaziz al-Omari, also with a University degree? Many of the hijackers were educated. Not that all of them needed to be to wield a box cutter and cut up a few flight crew members in order to execute someone elses well-conceived hijack plan.

Somehow, the idea of "top-secret" government projects (called X-projects for some strange reason *roll*) that can do the things that people claim they do seems as much of a conspiracy theory as the whole UFO paranoia. I think people are taking that old bromide about there being a kernel of truth inside every legend a little too seriously:P. People are foolish enough, or attention-starved enough or diseased enough, or naive enough to get there on their own. One can summarize this lunacy in a simple (albeit

I typically hear them refered to as black projects, and skunkworks type stuff, and the only place I have seen X anything is in regards to eXpierimental aircraft. The X-2 for example was the 1st plane to break the sound barrier, X-15 is in that realm of sound barrier breaking research as well, the X-35 is just the Joint Strike Fighter thats all the rage in the news.

Aside from that, I have often wondered if the 'conspiracy' is government supplied. Think about this, you are doing top secret research during

Presumably the Flying Spaghetti Monster's appendages are saucer shaped. The idea of many is that these flying saucers are nothing but the ends of his noodly appendages. I don't see why this isn't likely to be the case.

UFOs exist, that is a fact. A UFO is by definition an unidentified flying object. Hundreds of cases of aerial objects that can't be immediately identified have been reliably documented (and by qualified observers).

What you choose to "believe" or not believe is what UFOs represent. If your position is that it would be irrational to assume these represent alien spacecraft, then the correct statement would be "you always had to be a real "YAHOO!" to believe UFOs were alien spacecraft."

Unquestionably there's a lot of crap out there on these topics. But what we can probably all agree would be nice is if there were some site which organized such things with the ability for user moderation to raise the better material above the crap.

While I understand that this is probably good for pageviews and thus revenue, do we really have to encourage these people?

Yes, we should. There is a part of me that would love to have the cash to just throw up a DVR security system for 1.5-2K with 4 cameras and record everything that flies over head or also cars passing by my house. I'd want to be able to have pics/videos of what passed, and a date/time stamp, with the GPS cordinates, of my home. To me, every plane flying over my home is a UFO and every car

I'm a trained Ufologist and I'm thinking I would NEVER trust a search engine from IBM - that would be like giving me a UFO search engine written by the US gov't. I *KNOW* where the files I need to see are - they are in gov't bldgs at Area 51 and I don't need a search engine to tell me that.

What exactly is a "trained Ufologist"? As far as I'm aware, there are no degrees or otherwise officially recognized courses that would lend themselves to being referred to as "training" Ufologists. Which means that most Ufologists are of the self-taught persuasion.

Not that I'd mind being proven wrong. I'm just not aware of such a thing as you describe.

This reminds me of the time I was watching a show on Discovery about "lay lines." They were talking to a guy who was the world expert in them, and I could have sworn I had seen him before. Then they showed a clip of him driving a school bus, and it hit me: He drove my bus in elementary school!

So, really, a "trained ufologist" could be someone who is really interested in their hobby of looking at grainy photographs of saucer-shaped things.

Well, technically, even that broad term is regulary wrong. A large proportion of UFO sightings are simply funny shapped clouds and/or sunlight reflection/refraction in the atmosphere, so the O and F parts can be wrong. I personnaly propose (U)nidentified (A)thmospheric (P)henomenon instead.

The funny thing is, i see people here that laugh at the subject, when they are really the naive ones. I don't live in a box, or bubble. I welcome change, and i'm not afraid of it. Your bad jokes and unhealthy skepticism do not change the facts. These objects are real, and there needs to be a formal study and open discussion about it in the scientific community. It's not about little men from mars, and many people who lack research skills or the desire to solve the greatest mystery in the history of the huma

none of the skeptic will deny that there are indeed unidentified sky phenomenon, looking like objects, and sometimes being objects. What the skeptic deny is that you "believer" make the jump to alien-spacecraft, angel sent from God, flying unicorn or whatever you believe in without evidence whatsoever. Face it what pass as evidence by Ufo=aliens people is laughable at best. We got better photo of faery during the 19th century. Heck that funky hoax of bigfoot get better film and photo. And do not get me star

> How can a nutbar statement, as clearly identified by I won't touch on the Fisher Price physics that you learn in your public education systems, and the silly notions of comets with frosty tails and labeling stars as a nuclear furnaces., be interesting?

This is going to sound crazy; I'm sure to be marked a "troll" and all that, but the truth...just so you can hear it...is that *almost* all these anomalies are demons. Some are just the unknown, but most are much more.Yeah, I know; I felt the same way when I heard the concept. Fairy tales, nonsense and bullshit. I've learned differently.

I think it was 1996-97 or so, my buddy and I were working late a Lee Lumber. I forget the task at hand, but we'd come downstairs to "the floor" where we could smoke, maybe we

Delusional? Almost certainly, and as equally as the "occult" that you oppose so vehemently.

I understand that it's a lot easier to turn off the thinking, rational part of your brain and say, "There are demons at work here." It's also throwing away the very same gift of reason that God gave you in the first place. I'm all for ch

No, as a security guard, taking apart sounds while you're out on rounds is a part of the job. In fact, in the new bank building it was kinda fun. But consider closely the signal content: bristles on the inside of cardboard, dirt under the box, and all this just FEET away in a dead-silent, no one else is here situation. This isn't a distant noise like limbs of a tree brushing against a house; this is sound so close it couldn't be faked by a stereo system.I've been a skeptic for 41 years. I've dedicated a g

Well, didn't I *tell* you that you wouldn't believe it? Did you think that one day a sign would show up, telling you these things, pointing the way out?The signs are here. Starting with a document that's survived several thousand years, been found on 5-6 continents, and then (with the Dead Sea Scrolls) a copy from 1,000 years later, yet only typo-like issues remain. In it you'll find a very early mention of the shape of sea-going vessels, a guide to happy living, and for those who care to _actually_read_i

UFO sightings are not on the rise. If you have the opportunity to hang around the right circles, you'll notice that a _lot_ of persons believe they saw UFOs, ghosts and things like that. Sometimes they just want attention but often they really believe [amazon.ca] it. What has changed is that major news agencies repport those sighting. I think they figured that their credibility is not a stake anymore.

I read an article long ago (sorry, can't remember the source, probably an all audience science magazine) that concluded that if you add UFO sightings to religious/mystical apparitions and divide by local population, the rate is globally constant all over the world since centuries, but at the start of the cold war, religous apparitions dropped in western contries in favor of UFOs, folowwed in the next few decades by the rest of the world.The conclusion (and I tend to agree with it) was that a certain proport

Well, it's been said that a fool and his money are soon parted... and it occurs to me there's more than enough people who believe in UFO's, angels, haunted houses, etc. Search-engine-wise, it's an untapped market.

Probably not that much.Unfortunately yes. Not a lot, but far more than what they had invested to simply fine tune a generic search engine.I don't think so since I don't see news about gays or pink ponnies here today.

I think the distinction is that while intelligent, civilization-forming extraterrestrial life may be not only real but abundant on cosmic scales, the likelihood that any intelligent lifeform smart enough to develop an economical method of traveling interstellar distances within a reasonable timeframe would have any desire to come to Earth is exceedingly low.
And even if they did, it further stands to reason that they would either interfere with us outright, or be completely undetectable, that any experiments they performed would not be half-assed jobs that left people running around with partial memories chatting about it, and they would certainly not be allied with, much less occasionally overpowered by, the US government/military.

Disclaimer: I'm just continuing the logical argument and not expressing my own beliefs.

By the same token, you could consider our wildlife tagging and study methods to be half-assed. I mean, after all, we aren't undetectable to the animals in question. The people doing the studies just don't think the animals are intelligent enough to be phased by the actions being performed on them.

Who says we aren't experiencing the same thing from the animal's point of view?

Animals aren't intelligent, and we don't have to cross several lightyears in order to study them. If we had the capability to speak to the animals, and had to travel interstellar distances before we could even look at them, do you really think we'd bother tagging them?You'd have to be a bit crazy to suggest that a species which has perfected space-travel to the extent needed to make interstellar research viable could learn ANYTHING by sticking glorified thermometers up the asses of rednecks and certifiable

I wouldn't be so quick to jump to that conclusion. I've seen quite a few examples of intelligent animals. The two that come to mind off the top of my head are my cat and dog.

My cat has figured out how to lock the door to my house and enjoys doing so every time I step outside if I've made him angry. It has gotten to the point that I take my keys with me if I go to check the mail.

My dog, on the other hand, figured out how to undo any lock we attached to his collar. The only thing

Personally, I think that your assertion that animals are unintelligent is pretty well shot...

Not only that, it reflects poorly on the grandparent poster's own intelligence. It's like when someone in a forum tries to insult someone and misspells "idiot" in the process.

To take a page from Douglass Adams, I think humans would be lucky to make it in the "Top 5 Most Intelligent" on the planet. Elephants, dolphins, cats, parakeets, whales, etc. -- they all seem quite intelligent to me. And they don't have t

My cat is a really interesting case. Not only is he very intelligent, he's also not entirely domestic. He's part bobcat and has the attitude (not to mention the large fangs and striking power) to match.His vet thinks that he's gorgeous (he's also part maine coon so he is indeed a very beautiful cat), but quickly decided to let me do all of the animal handling when she saw the weaponry he was packing and was warned about his attitude toward strangers - especially vets (he caused his old vet to get stitches

*sigh* there's always one of you around...Listen, you define intelligence how you want, and I'll define it how I want. Just keep in mind that even the most developmentally retarded humans are capable of performing feats more impressive than the most intelligent animals. Your pets being able to perform a few tricks really doesn't impress me much. I've worked professionally with dogs, and I've consistently been impressed with some of the things they are capable of doing. What I've come to realize over ti

It is quite apparent that after tagging the wildlife INDEED comes back to normal life. It is quite apparent that so called "abductee" (sic) never return to normal life. So it does not seem comparable. Also for kicker, many of that wild life animals are not able to recognize reflection of themselves, while only a few other can (human and a few apes within that group, and a few mamals). I will not say that it proves that animals are mindless, but it is a big hint on that your argument is not that good.

Again, continuing the argument along those lines (and again stating that we're not outlining my beliefs, just following a logical course), it would be possible that an even higher order of being would think the same of us as you do of the lower animals.

Higher and lower are, on some levels, really just a matter of perspective which leads to classification. So, really, are the ways that intelligence is measured. See my comment to the poster above you about my dog, my cat, and primate tool use.

No it doesn't. What you've laid out is the possibility of intelligent life on other planets.

You haven't addressed some of the other very real challenges, e.g. the prohibitiveness of interstellar travel, statistically insignificant chance of "them" finding "us", etc..., you've just assumed intelligent life on other planets implies the possibility of UFO's.

Note that I think ne is ridiculous, I would expect that to be a fractional quantity.

You have to make a slight modification if you want to find out if there are alien visitors in UFOs hanging around (add a couple of extra fractional multipliers).

The Drake Equation is a load of crap anyway. While it can be reasonably argued that the equation itself is good, so many of the terms are such complete unknown quantities that anything you plug in will by necessity be a wild-ass guess, and likewise the subsequent answer. Yeah, I agree that setting ne at '2' is ridiculous. Of course, setting the terms that come after ne at anything at all and claiming they're accurate is even worse. Frank Drake's a pie-eyed dreamer who had a foregone conclusion to reach.

I imagine the number of people in the world who don't hold some sort of irrational belief based on no evidence whatsoever is so incredibly small that we may as well call it 0. I like to think that my own superstitions or irrational behaviors are slightly less crazy than believing that there are extraterrestrials flying around in Earth's atmosphere all the time who only ever make contact with random nutjobs out in the boonies and the whole thing is covered up by a really good conspiracy, or that there's some

I believe in UFOs but not the other stuff. Why? Because there are UFOs. There are many things we see in the sky and record which, after exhaustive analysis and investigation, cannot be explained. Thus, they are Unidentified Flying Objects.

Even Project Blue Book, for the scam that it was, had a small percentage of cases which could not be explained.

Does this mean that these are crafts from another planet? Maybe, maybe not. All

And of course, we cannot find anything if we do not seek it. Which is exactly what this is. I suppose you don't believe in the higgs boson either [wikipedia.org]?

Now you *can* logically argue that we are unlikely to find these things, or its not economically in our interests to devote resources to the search for them. But Please, if you're going to be a "skeptic" at least base your skepticism in something more "sci

Absence of proof is what all scepticism is based on. When you investigate 9,000 cases of reported UFO sightings, or reported "miracle healers", or "psychics", "fortune tellers", "dowsers", and "honest politicians", and EVERY SINGLE ONE turns out to be a fraud, does it really make sense to believe that case number 9,001 will turn out to be the real deal? Not bloody likely. You, like many other people before you, have raped the phrase "absence of proof is not proof of absence". It absolutely does not appl

Okay, you seem to have missed the *entire* point of the previous post. You are basing skepticism on the probability of an even occurring. Congratulations, thats what I was suggesting. There has to be a way of separating the higgs boson from the tooth fairy. And absence of proof isn't enough.
.

I never said it was. Santa Clause can be proven to not exist because his existence predicts events, and those events have never happened. Its testable as a hypothosis, and can therefore be disproved. Non testable theories can never be disproved. Does that mean the can be proved. again no.

With any belief system, there are always some axioms - weasle words you just have to accept otherwise the system, and thus any framework for discussion/debate, falls down.

God made the Universe: Ok then, so where did God come from? Well He's always been there... So if God has always been there why can't the Universe have always been there? Nope, God existed before everything else.

The Universe was created by the Big Bang: OK what was there before the Big Bang (ie. where did all that energy come from)? You can

My thought is that the word Belief is problematic. To believe is the same as to not believe--it means that you pre-choose a position and start discarding evidence that my come in to support the opposing position.To be able to state what you know without going into what you believe would be much better.

There is no evidence about God one way or the other... You are welcome to choose to believe something, just remember that it's your personal opinion and not a fact--unless you have personal evidence.